I haven’t seen the Blue Collar Comedy Tour show in a long time – I miss it. Ron White was part of it along with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall (who appears, from time to time, on Last Man Standing with Tim Allen), and Larry the Cable Guy. Always ready with a quip or a long story, he cracked me up because he was always trying to deliver his material dead-pan…
…and couldn’t help himself by breaking into a wide smile and/or laughing.
And he’s right – our nascent Police State (“Shelter in Place! Stay at home!”) has locked down almost everything in many states. Whodda believed that Vermont, of all places, would be going into Walmarts and Targets and taping off large swaths of those stores with yellow Police tape and (figuratively yelling) “YOU CAN’T BUY THAT – it’s NON-essential – you don’t need that!!!!”.
Sorry, I’m old enough to have seen the pictures of the Iron Curtain countries stores and knew why the shelves were bare – the Govt decided “you don’t need that”. And we laughed in that we knew how much better we had it here in our free (mostly) market.
And now, on a whim, our markets aren’t that free any more. No, I’m not talking about the empty shelves due to demand outstripping the supply – the market will adjust soon. But the virtually empty shelves, made that way by Government adopting policies of “You don’t NEED that” is akin to what happened to those UNfree people on the other side of the Curtain.
So, you get arrested and fined for just strolling around, even by oneself (or just paddling about, VERY socially distant, in the waters of California). Do you then get jailed?
So when do you get released – before or AFTER the actual criminals that many locales are releasing from jail, now with both their criminal pasts (and high recidivism rates) AND a possible case of Kung Flu – a double jeopardy for the rest of us.
That is the proper role of Government? One that has no real grasp of either Left or Right hand or solidly integrated policies? It’s as if Government is devolving into individual fiefdoms depending on who is in charge (yeah, I know, I know)…
Someone in one of our comment sections made the observation that our forefathers put up with far less in starting the Revolutionary War. Ditto the TEA Party in the aughts of this century. Both stem from the sense of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!!”.
Nothing as of yet but from what I am seeing, peoples temperatures are starting to go up and it isn’t due to the China Flu – but they are because of Government’s ham-fisted response to it. When there is compression, there is heat; “For every action there is a reaction” hold true not only in chemistry/physics but in politics as well. The former is generally in real time; the political one can take some time but when it happens, watch out.